Notable DVD Releases

It's been a long time, and to those I promised a review of Brocka's Cadena de Amor (1971), that's coming soon. But for now, look at all of these very, very notable Tagalog DVD releases from this year. 2007 was a great year for Tagalog DVD releases, and these prove just why.

1. Celso ad Castillo's Tag Ulan sa Tag Araw (1976)
2. Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (1974), Insiang (1976), Tatlo, Dalawa, Isa (1974), and Tatay Kong Nanay (1978)
3. Ishmael Bernal's Himala (1982) and Broken Marriage (1983)
4. Elwood Perez's Silip (1986)
5. Joey Gosiengfiao's Temptation Island (1981)

This is not exactly an expansive release of the most significant Filipino films on DVD (until Gosiengfiao's Babae, Ngayonat Kailanman (1977) gets a DVD release, I don't think the best of Filipino cinema has been as of yet released on DVD), nor are they as celebrated as the releases for the early films by Burnett or Davies, but the release of these films are still important steps towards wider recognition of Filipino cinema. And most of these are English-subtitled, so buy, buy buy!

Endo (Jade Castro, 2007)

A film about the transience of contemporary Filipino life, Endo is yet another indie-digital film to come out of the recent digital new wave that is taking over the country and some would argue, the third (fourth, maybe? But the pre-war years don’t really count, simply because no one has seen the most significant movies from the era, thus no one can really argue for that period’s greatness) golden age in Philippine cinema. Having not seen some of the most significant films since the inception of this new wave, I can’t really make a judgment of the quality of the films of this new movement, nor can I compare Endo to its contemporaries. However, if Endo is an indication of the things to come, we can definitely say that the future both looks bright, and has a very, very long way to go.

Endo is one of those rare movies that never wore its ideology (too) flamboyantly. The film never brazenly displayed any indication of what it is “about,” only that it is a film “of.” Sure, it is a film about capitalism, rootlessness, and poverty, but it has the great qualities of a Mike Leigh film, where the politics and ideologies are so imbued into the character and action that these “issues” never demanded to be called or named to be felt. In Endo, Leo (Jason Abalos) deals with the impermanence of family, love, relationship, and home made fleeting by capitalism, poverty, and the lack of an “identity” brought forth by a history defined by conquest and depersonalization. “Endo” stands for “end of contract,” or a temporary worker whose brief contractual job (usually in the service sector) is about to come to an end. These workers usually jump from one meager job to another, and Leo’s relationships follow the pattern of his career changes. Girlfriends change as jobs change, family dynamics change with the amount of money coming in, and friendships formed revolve around the drinking parties thrown by “endos” about to enter another job.

Leo’s habit of changing women like he changes shoes is complicated with the arrival of Tanya (Ina Feleo), who is a bit more conscious of the weariness of a life of a contract worker, but is still incapable of escaping the allure of having a “comfortable life.” The connection between Leo and Tanya is defined by its compartmentalization into categories, which stand as meeting points through which the two are allowed to interact. Not only are their lives drowned by the jobs that define them—their everyday flirtation involves looking out of their respective storefronts to look at the other across the mall, at another store—even their private moments are defined by the painful realization that nothing in their state could ever be permanent. Their most tender moment occur after work, when they listen to Leo’s bootleg CDs in his CD player that always threatens to fall apart at the most crucial moments. In one scene, they listen to music as they dance in the streets at night (who says Manila nights look bad in digital films; it is not a matter of making Manila look beautiful at night, it is a matter of redefining the beauty of a city by night), after realizing that the cover fee for a trendy bar is too expensive for them. Leo and Tanya become two lonely souls right out of a Wong Kar-Wai milieu, but instead of being merely wandering souls looking to belong, the scene is most heartbreaking because these two simply do not belong. Whereas Kar-Wai’s sensual lighting and color palette romanticizes loneliness, Castro’s separation of his two characters through his color palette (two blue characters amidst a warm, sepia city) is downright damning.

One scene however that exemplifies the film’s entire theme is Leo and Tanya’s meeting a hotel, blasting the room’s air conditioning and sleeping under sheets, naked after making love. The two have met at a hotel to have sex before this scene, and the room’s impersonality is merely underlined by the scene and not established. But when their conversation turns to their dreams, what is most shocking is the revelation of their incapability of discussing a future rooted in a certain place. Instead of a house, a family, and pets, their dreams turn to meager jobs somewhere else, in Canada or Australia. They happily discuss a comfortable life of dustless existence (“Dust in Canada is probably different compared to dust in here”) without a place to define them. The inevitability of foreigness emphasizes a context that has already ousted them, a context that rejects its people as much as the people reject it. This one simple scene filled with innocence and the imminence of the painful awakening is a more sophisticated treatment of the issue of Filipino immigration than a more recent film, La Visa Loca, or the 1984 Gil Portes classic, ‘Merika. Whereas these two latter films were too fixated on the capability of a racial and/or ethnic identity to define people, Castro chose the more complicated approach of questioning the systematic identities that defines people.

Like its French 60s counterpart, or even its 80s Regal Films-conceived older siblings, Endo brims with the energy and exciting possibilities of youth. Leo, Tanya, and everybody else’s awakening, although painful, nevertheless comes with the force of promise and the surprise of things learned (sometimes anew, like the love for a father). However, although the film’s script is fun and insightful, the visuals are ultimately the movie’s downfall. To the point, the movie looks like crap. The entire time I sat to watch the film, my constant reaction was, “this would be great with my eyes closed.” Not to sound like the cinematic version of Joseph II, Castro employs far too many cuts. Unlike the elegance of the long takes in Jeturian’s Kubrador or Keith Sicat and Sari Raissa Lluch Dalena’s Rigodon (2005), Castro chose to mangle his already suffering camerawork by cutting for angle-changes and other visual flourishes that really amount to nothing. True, it may be limiting to suggest that the long take is video/digital’s primary function, but freedom to cut should come with it the intent of creating meaningful montage rather than just creating “flow” and “dynamism,” effects that the engaging story did not need in the first place.

Castro’s ADD-inflected editing seems to me points to his inherent mistrust of his incredibly talented actors. See, John Cassavetes already demonstrated that mediocre photography could be more than salvaged by deeply-felt sincerity and the effort made to translate this sincerity on-screen. Cassavetes had the sense to stay on his actors long enough until they register those subtle, Cassavetes-trademark acting that reveal the world in small gestures. When he cuts, he cuts to expand this world. In other words, he cuts—or moves his camera—to his actors to reveal meaning. But Castro does the exact opposite: just when Feleo’s face becomes most expressive, he cuts to Abalos’ face or some other actor’s face to see their reaction to Feleo’s undisplayed flutters. In one damning scene, when Tanya waits for the results of a pregnancy test, Castro shoots the scene through a mirror, showing Tanya’s reflection—and a co-worker next to her—rather than her face itself. When the unease—and relative inaction—of the wait begins, he pans sideways, preferring to show an unflattering and unrevealing profile of the co-worker looking at Tanya. Instead of finally adding a bold underline to the idea of transitory identities and the pain of the wait, we get…well, nothing but an underlit and meaningless medium shot of a character who in turn is never fully fleshed-out because of her unremarkable position in relation to the camera. It’s a preposterous camera movement that ultimately added nothing to the story, and criminally kept Feleo’s acting from elevating the movie’s core emotions.

At this point, I would have liked to argue that I finally decided to shut my eyes and just listen to the film. But in reality, by this time the story has so devolved into yet another love triangle that one cannot help but be sorely disappointed at the downturn the film took in its last half hour. When Candy (Karla Pace), Leo’s former girlfriend who left him when her contract expired, returns, her character is portrayed as materialistic, as if her aspirations for a “comfortable life” is any different to those of Tanya and Leo’s. It was an easy choice to degrade her character as a fallen woman made bad by her attempts to reclaim Leo, but it is condescending and out of touch with the film’s earlier premise of understanding people’s private experiences in a public context. But I guess it only makes sense because by this time, Leo’s (overdramatized) attempts to get Tanya back are played for drama and seemingly nothing else. The movie’s final third is so disconnected that it managed to pull down the genius of the first hour and turn its conflicts asinine. The film could have easily ended when Leo’s old cell phone started ringing again, suggesting circularity as well as yet another transition, but the ending is so odious that it managed to degrade what could have easily been an instant classic to yet another mediocre and forgettable production.

Santiago! (Lino Brocka, 1970)

*Apparently, like other films produced under LEA Films, this one is presumably lost except for the bad video copies made of it. Yay for film preservation.

Lino Brocka’s Santiago is, if anything else, Philippine Cinema’s Ascenseur pour l’echafaud (1958): it signaled the arrival of a new cinematic consciousness that soon took over an entire nation’s cinematic tradition without actually being mired in the very techniques that it announced. Santiago bears the themes that will later become Brocka’s preoccupations—mainly, an individual observing society from the outside and the depiction of the diverse and sophisticated ways people respond to oppression and suffering—but is still made with what seems to be techniques of a studio-based First Golden Age Cinema: overbearing music that isn’t so much a counterpoint to the image as much as a melodramatic underline to the image; a by and large straightforward narrative with a by and large clear resolution to the conflict (by and large because although the narrative and the conclusion are clear and predictable, Brocka never really just lets them be without tinkering with them); and by and large a stagey feel that lacks the raw realism that Brocka later perfects in films such as Insiang (1976) an Maynila sa Kuko ng Liwanag (1975). But throughout Santiago, one senses Brocka’s dislike of the conventions he is working through, and he makes it loudly known that this indeed is his film.

If Mario O’Hara’s Tatlong Taon Walang Diyos (1975) is worthy of being seen (among other reasons) for its willingness to reconsider the Japanese enemy during WWII (the hatred of whom is something that should never be underestimated, especially in Asia), Santiago is worthy of being seen for its willingness to reconsider the Filipino resistance during the war. Through Gonzalo’s (Fernando Poe, Jr.) conscience, Brocka reassess the tactics used by the Filipino guerillas during the war, and the macho admiration of men who give up family and life to fight through whatever means, even if it is killing fellow countrymen. See, Gonzalo was ordered to blow up a building which was suspected of being a Japanese cache. But after he installs the dynamite, he finds that the building also housed a number of Filipino civilians, including numerous women and children. He ends up killing all except one, a girl who he brings to a nearby small village after he turns his back to the resistance in shame.

However, his idleness and willingness to work but not fight was understood by the villagers as cowardice, especially by the families who have fathers and sons who are fighting the Japanese. Worse still is that he is compared to Dante Romero’s character, who, despite killing a family of Japanese informants and is seen as a hero, is revealed to a be a cold-blooded killer who kills not just out of duty, but out of pleasure. Things come to a head when Romero’s character, jealous of the attention his former girlfriend (Boots Anson-Roa) is Giving Gonzalo, reveals to the villagers that Gonzalo did indeed blew up the building that killed many civilians in the nearby town and not the Japanese. Angered, they storm Gonzalo and drive him out of the village. He returns later when the Japanese invades the town to save the villagers from the Japanese.

As an outsider, Gonzalo’s character is the person through which Brocka measures the town’s morals and values. Far from the fight themselves, the town is free to discuss issues of violence, war, and guilt while Gonzalo, having gone through the follies of war, internalizes these same issues. Through horrific flashbacks and what looks like dream sequences, Brocka allows us inside Gonzalo’s head and experience the war as it is to this one man. But from the way he cuts the scenes in the village, one can tell that in this place, it is all about the reaction to war rather than war itself. Although reaction-based editing (where a depiction of an action precedes a cut that leads to a reaction to the action; forgive me for not knowing the technical term for them) is standard in studio-made productions, here Brocka uses them to show that in this case, it’s all about the reaction, not the action the produces them. Also, it doesn’t help that when the townies speak, they speak with a very literary tone (again, standard fare in pre-70s Filipino cinema). That is, they speak with the tone of someone who hasn’t experienced the horror of the thing they speak of.

Gonzalo however isn’t exactly the perfect hero who later forgets the town’s hatred when it is his turn to save it. The film’s last scene harks back to the first scene, but this time Gonzalo knows full well what he is doing. In the last scene, Gonzalo is faced with the same dilemma: they finally crossed the bridge connecting the town across river, and they must now blow-up the bridge to prevent the Japanese from following them. But problem is that some of the other villagers are still crossing the bridge, so Gonzalo must now choose between the people already across the bridge and the other villagers still across the river. Ultimately, he chooses to sacrifice the people still crossing the bridge, giving the signal to blow-up the bridge with a large degree of certainty. Was Gonzalo sacrificing them in retaliation? Was he finally free of guilt? Or did he do it out of necessity, understanding that his mission’s importance ultimately outweighs the lives of a few? We don’t really know Gonzalo’s motivations for his actions, but if there is anything that we are sure it is that this act solidifies Gonzalo’s loss of innocence and sense of right and wrong. From the non in, a life is just yet another thing that will be eliminated if it comes down to it.

Jay Ilagan’s character underlines this loss of innocence by representing that childhood that is ravaged in the process of knowing the cruelties of life. Ilagan is introduced as a young boatman who helps Gonzalo cross the river to the nearby village, and he is also the local who showed the rebels the tunnels under the church which helped them enter the church without being spotted by the Japanese. From the character that led Gonzalo to the peaceful paradise of the town, Ilagan became the person who led him back to the harsh truths of war and death. Throughout the film, he becomes witness to the changes that Gonzalo goes through, and he himself goes through changes that reflect the demands of the small town of a man. He isn’t an innocent bystander, but the film’s Junior (Brocka’s other young witness in his epic Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kuling (“Weighed But Found Wanting,” 1974). As an insider, he grows up defined by the ways and traditions of the town. But unlike Junior, Ilagan’s character doesn’t grow to transcend and ultimately judge the town, but rather grow to reflect the town itself.

If there is anything that the film exceeds in exceptionally well, it is the significant flashbacks that were shot and edited as if inspired by the Russian silent avante gardes. These flashbacks pierce through the relative serenity of the village by revealing the horror that the village seems to be hiding from itself. When Anson-Roa’s character embraces Dante’s character in reconciliation, he is reminded of the past: the sweet and mellow past of parades, beauty pageants, and fireworks, but also the violent past of Dante killing a family. The most significant however is Caridad Sanchez’s character’s flashbacks. Sanchez’s character is the town’s madwoman, and her flashback reveals why: raped by a gang of Japanese soldiers, her husband’s groin pierced by a bayonet, her husband leaves her to join the resistance. Later she bears the child of one of the Japanese soldiers that raped her. In a fit of rage, her husband kills the child. Mind you, these images are sensually shot in sepia as if Dovzhenko himself rose from the dead to shoot them, and cut together as if Eisenstein directed Brocka what to do. Close ups of hands, groins, and knives are interspersed along with shots of pained faces and faces in pleasure, thus abstracting the action into the objects and people’s reaction to their use. These images are coupled with Caridad Sanchez and Mario O’Hara’s great performances as husband and wife. And there are not enough words to describe how courageous their portrayals are: O’Hara having his groin pierced and bloodied in close-up, Sanchez in a very brief but very powerful topless shot.

Santiago will probably never be considered amongst other Brocka masterpieces. It is far too compromised, lacking the power of a film if Brocka is allowed full helm of the project, as seen in films such as Bona (1980) or Insiang. But nevertheless, this film is worth looking at if not for the way it dealt with WWII, for the way it shows how Brocka dealt with the limitations of studio-filmmaking before the new wave that he and a few others led, and how he harnessed his power as an artist to create equally powerful films later on in his career.

Curios and He Haws from Video 48

Here's something of interest from Video 48's newly-established blog: Lino Brocka's membership card, detailing films he borrowed a few days before his very untimely death. I can't really read much of the scribble, but it seems some fo the titles he borrowed were Mata Hari, The Snake Pit, Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, The Year of Living Dangerously, Salaam Bombay, Bad and the Beautiful, Seventeenth Bride, I Vitelloni, Angel of Vengeance, and The Hunter. Great stuff.

For those who do not know, Video 48 is probably as instrumental as those Quiapo sidewalks in creating what is becoming Philippines' new [digital] wave. With past customers such as Brocka, and new customers such as Jeturian, it seems it is not necessarily giving birth to a new order, but merely continuing a tradition. In terms of influence, it 's like Philippines' Criterion Collection and NYU-Tisch rolled into one lowly street corner in Quezon City. I've never bee to the place (I was still young when I left the country), but its reputation is well known amongst cinephiles who make their presences known online.

The Video Store of the Damned

Hey, anybody wanna go hit Quiapo with me?

Inay ("Mother," Lino Brocka, 1977)

Brocka’s Inay starts appropriately enough with a sad song: the mother (Alicia Vergel), a retiring teacher, is serenaded by her colleagues while her son Maning (Dindo Fernando) looks on, half-sad, half-exasperated, and half-dubious. The loss of an apparently great and well-loved teacher mirrors the loss of traditional values as represented by the mother, and the loss of childhood from the provider’s perspective. It is Brocka’s take on Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 Tokyo monogatari, where selfish and ungrateful children turn their back on their aging parents and equally, to the history and culture that is slowly being replaced by the then rapidly changing Japanese society. Brocka gave his own twist on the story, making explicit the economic basis of the conflict, the resistance of tradition against the creeping mores of urbanity, and the power struggle between child/present and parent/past.

Unlike Ozu, Brocka did not make his parental figure as tragically innocent or simple as Ozu’s mother and father, whose willingness to flow with the changes represented by their children heightened the sense of the children’s betrayal. Brocka’s mother isn’t exactly the most endearing person in the world (immediately after her retirement, she wakes up Maning’s entire family on a Sunday and calls him and his doting wife (Connie Reyes) irresponsible and lazy for letting their children stay in bed so late), nor is she the most self-sacrificing, selfishly starting drama with every woman she thinks is replacing her role as provider for her children. It isn’t just a past that is criminally being swept aside for the forward drive of the present, but a past that is stubbornly reasserting itself the hindering the necessity of adapting to change. The final image of the mother wittily conveys this stubbornness both in the mother’s assertion of power and the child’s impulse to resist: finding out that Maning’s third child is finally born after hearing it cry, the mother runs to the baby, carries it and wags her finger in an attempt to impose herself onto the baby to make it stop crying. The freeze-frame of her waging her finger and the baby crying is comparable to the final fight scene between Lucia (Adela Legra) and Tomas (Adolfo Llaurado) in Lucia (Humberto Solas, 1968), where the frozen emotion isn’t that of conclusion, but a sense that the struggle, although somewhat tragic, will indeed comically continue. Unlike however the beaming face that ends Tokyo monogatari, the vagueness isn’t couched on philosophy, but rooted on social context.

The mother’s differing relationships with her children reveals that the children’s slight rejection (because their rejection isn’t as obviously contemptuous as Tokyo monogatari’s) isn’t merely out of selfishness and ingratitude. With Maning, the mother self-righteousness is borne out of Maning’s poverty because he chose to teach at a public school like his mother instead of going for the corporate jobs that his siblings went for. The brunt of the past strikes most viciously against the people that the present has left behind, and the mother’s vindictiveness is a reminder of a history defined by colonial and postcolonial oppression. The mother’s communication with her Romy (Orestes Ojeda) on the other hand reveals that very Filipino-Hispanic tradition of maharlika, or a society that is ruled over by the very rich few. Not only does the maharlika rule over the society, it demands respect from the minions it rules over. Romy became rich after he marries a woman from a rich family. The mother’s interaction with Romy and Daisy is one of reverence, as if age matters very little in the face of inequality. Laid side by side with her treatment of Maning, it seems the mother cannot possibly lecture Romy and his family because the society that he represents is exactly the society that defines the past.

The mother’s relationship with her only daughter Daisy (Chanda Romero) is predictable in that she treats her as society treats women: as bearer of a culture’s very identity. The relationship here isn’t merely one of an oppressor and the oppressed. Repeatedly, the mother reveals how proud she is of her daughter, and how she is the most responsible and reliable of the siblings. Unlike the conflict-laden first meetings between the mother and the other three siblings, the mother’s first interaction with Daisy is very calm, and the daughter—unlike the daughter-in-laws in Ozu’s film—is neither ecstatic nor unhappy about her mother’s visit. It seems that Daisy is merely resigned to the fact that that is the way things work, the mother visits her children. However, it is also Daisy who causes the most trouble. After the mother finds out that Daisy is having an affair with a married man (a fact delivered with such simplicity and giveness as Bernal’s films about infidelity, many made around the same time), and is bearing his child without any intent of marrying him, the mother declares Daisy a whore and causes a scare after she collapses of anger. Compared with the innocence of the young Daisy, represented by the photograph that the mother carries around of Daisy’s first communion, this version of that child represents a totally different value system, a totally different outlook on life—that is, a bearer that brings a cultural identity that is alien from the identity that the mother represented. The conflicts between the mother and daughter were the most explosive and devastating because the depiction of two clashing value systems isn’t merely ideological, but a display of two women whose very being—womanhood, if you wanna go in that direction—is threatened by each other’s presence.

Finally, there’s Alex (Ace Vergel, appropriately enough the mother’s son in real life), the youngest of the four siblings who also inhabits the oddest position of all of them. He is a rich, self-made executive, but he doesn’t seem to have the economic baggage that defines Maning or Romy. He is also “liberated,” but doesn’t have Daisy’s sexual baggage. He is clearly the mother’s favorite, but it is palpable how confused the mother is in dealing with him. He brings his sexual conquests back home for his mother to see, but his conscience more than weighs on him as he painfully admits to his mother his promiscuity. His apartment is atop a supposedly very high building overlooking Manila, and Brocka takes great pains to show the mother’s suffering everytime she ascends to stairs to his apartment (she doesn’t want to take the elevator in fear of getting stuck midway to the apartment), even framing her Vertigo-style without the accompanying disorienting Vertigo shot. Looking at his relationship with his maid (who acts as a surrogate mother to him, a relationship the mother finds extremely displeasing), Alex does live the lifestyle of a big spender, but is almost apologetic in the way he subsequently must treat the people below him. Unlike Romy, he is unafraid to bring his poor brother’s family to Manila as guests. Unlike his siblings, he isn’t necessarily stuck in reliving the injustices of the past, nor is he so adamant in his push for the future that he alienates his family, especially his mother. It is as if he represents the indefinable yet concrete nature of the present, found balancing itself with the backwards-trajectory of history and past, and the forward march of the future. Like his apartment, he is afforded the bird’s-eye view of human progress afforded the future, but also finds his feet planted in the ground below.

It is in this setting that the mother finally realizes that her children have indeed grown up. Although earlier she insists that the mother may stop caring for her children, but the children will never stop needing their mother, the Christmas dinner in Alex’s house, where Romy, his wife, Daisy, and Alex come for dinner but leaves for other engagements reveals that the situation is actually reversed: it is the mother who will always be in need of children to care for. Her realization’s tragedy is recognizably a Filipino one: it’s Christmas, and there’s no family (and extended family) to celebrate it. But her move back to Maning’s house the next day reveals that Brocka isn’t necessarily just suggesting mere abandonment. The mother is revealed to be free all along, moving from one house to another not out of necessity, but of the sheer pleasure of changing allegiances and relationships. This sketch of familial relationship complicates blood ties by suggesting that rather than a rigidly defined connection, a family’s relationship itself is negotiable, fluid, and shifting, just as people’s position within history and social change is equally a balance between forward and backward, stops and gos. In the end, when the film harks back to the first scene when her colleagues celebrate the mother’s retirement from teaching, we aren’t reminded of the sad song but of Maning’s face, dubious of such displays of certainty of the linearity of history, and the happy rendition of “For (S)he’s a Jolly Good Fellow” that follows the teachers’ sad song, where her coworkers form a circle around her and dances back and forth around the mother.

Murder! (Alfred Hitchcock, 1930)

First off, I have to express how much I love this poster (from the film's own Wikipedia page). The hand is reminiscent of that omniscient hand at the end of Lang's M, which was released a year after Murder! This time around, the hand isn't the the hand that connects the mind to the heart, but society's hand that punishes the guilty, even if wrongly.

Unlike the slew of film musicals that were popular during the advent of sound, which focused mainly on the intrigues of backstage life, Murder! incorporates theatre itself, specifically theatricality and how "art criticizes life," according to Sir John Menier (Herbert Marshall), a leading actor and playwright who, after being ridden with guilt after sitting in a jury that prosecuted and condemned innocent Diana Baring (Norah Baring) of murder, sought to prove her innocence with the help of fellow actor Ted Markham (Edward Chapman). Menier proves actress/character Baring's innocence by going back to his art and understanding the psychology of guilt that one of the jury members elucidated before being bullied into changing her verdict and justifying what gravitated him to her in the first place: her dainty look of purity, and fragility, a view justified by Menier's stature as an intellectual. (Another jury member that didn't think Baring was guilty came to the same conclusion, only that he wasn't able to justify his connection between innocence and a pretty face other than by invoking his sexual bias.) How Menier exactly makes the connection between theatre/theatricality/acting/artifice and reality/innocence/guilt is not clear to me because the scenes that elucidated the connections were far too talky. They lack Hitchcock's visual flair. Being only the third sound film of a still young Hitchcock, the awkwardness of the plainly straightforward dialog-driven scenes is forgivable, if only because the film's true core is when Hitchcock's visual style flies.

These scenes truly are remarkable. The opening scene contains much promise: a tracking shot of windows, with lights turning on and heads poking out as the camera passes to check the disturbance downstairs. The disturbance of course is a woman's scream, following the murder that sets off the film. From the beginning, Hitchcock already gives us an impression that this isn't a simple crime that involves only a murderer, the murdered, and a few witnesses. Rather, it's a murder that could only be solved if one goes back to the theatrical community that brought it about. When the police--and justice, presumably--got closest to the true killer, they are backstage, interviewing the theater company in which Baring belongs. The scene is an amazing sketch of performed reality, as the interviewed "witnesses," who presumably are being their genuine selves as they tell the police (who are themselves in costume, like th theatrical polices that they are interviewing) what they think really happened, change their dispositions as they get ready to enter the stage. The camera the switches back and forth between the interrogation scene and the play being performed (and presumably the scene that is more real to the filmic audience because it is the scene that they can see and thus prove the existence), critiques the scene that comes before, where a camera travels back and forth between two rooms (obviously studio sets) as two characters discuss the murder as they walk back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room. The performance at the theater emphasizes the performance of the two actresses as they realistically perform their roles for the film.

Just like his experiments with sound in Blackmail (1929), Hitchcock also makes use of sound well, even if they are drowned out by the middle chunk of the film where the film is all talk. The film is driven to action by a shriek. Later, when the dead body is discovered, reality is sucked back in by a loud sigh. In what is known to be one of the first example of an internal monologue, Menier's face deftly registers his guilt and his consciousness, even if his voice is threatened to be drowned out by the orchestral piece (which apparently was being recorded simultaneously from an orchestra playing in the back) that heightens the emotion he conveys with his face. Some of his filmed dialogs aren't necessarily bad either: during the jury deliberation scene, the camera smoothly travels back and forth as the power struggle between the jurors, culminating in a montage of faces as the jurors bully Menier into convicting Baring. Also, when it is Menier's turn to bully the real killer, the scene turns into one of stares and hand gestures, specifically Handel Fane (Esmy Percy) conveying his shock of being found-out with his hands as he simultaneously douses a cigarette butt.

Fane/Esmy is the pivotal character of the film because he is the very definition of performativity. A multiracial man who is also possibly gay, Fane is an actor who specializes in that very English role of a woman--really, a woman who has lost her feminine fragility which to a large extent desexualizes her--played by an effeminate man. His first "appearance" as the murderer has him running down the streets in police costume, which he later substitutes for a dress, and later again for the police costume, and finally for a dress for his final trapeze act. His final scene atop the circus tent is incredible, a portrait of a man who, in front of everybody, is finally laid bare and removed of his disguises. Acting himself finally becomes overbearing, and he enacts the hanging that was reserved for Baring. His act reveals the truth and brings the loop back to the closing scene behind the proscenium arch, where the victorious couple--Menier and Baring, with Menier finally satisfying the sexual attraction that led him to help Baring in the first place--enacts their celebratory kiss.

The Lost and Found Box: Rediscovering a Cinematic Tradition

*NOTE: don’t be offended if you think some archivists are already doing the things I outline here: this is mostly me just brainstorming to myself about the ways of discovering Filipino films.

A discovery: Lamberto Avellana’s Sarjan Hassan (1955), a Malaysian film co-directed with filmmaker P. Ramlee, is available on VCD in Malaysia (with English subtitles!). (Sarjan Hassan of course is not only worthy of watching because it was made by Avellana, but also because it was co-directed by one of Malaysia’s greatest filmmakers.) Also, a number of Ramon Estrella’s films in Singapore and Malaysia are available on video as well. They were remnants of a time when Filipino filmmakers, along with Indian filmmakers, traveled all over Asia to develop the art in other countries. Apparently, many of their movies did not resonate as well with the local audience as those made by local filmmakers, possibly because they were more “Filipino” than Malaysian (although I wouldn’t really know what that means). Tinged with American influences, these films reflected a colonial past that was foreign to Malaysia, and an industry that displays affections for Western filmmaking through the numerous co-productions and exploitations that have existed between Hollywood and Philippine movie industry since its inception. I argue that because of this, it is worthy to consider and study these films as part of the Filipino film heritage despite the use of a foreign language.

Of course, finding Filipino movies in foreign places isn’t exactly big news. Many of Lino Brocka’s great works (including Bona) are stashed in Paris, where failed screenings planned for foreign festivals (many due to political reasons) stranded the reels in these archives and ironically, ensured their preservation. In Howie Severino’s search for lost Filipino movies, he documents the discovery of movies in Hong Kong (Gerardo de Leon’s Sanda Wong, in the Shaw Brothers vault I believe) and Thailand (a lost Darna movie and Gerardo de Leon’s Banga ni Zimadar, both dubbed for theatrical release in Thailand), as well as discovery of contemporary (as late as the 70s!) movies in the Anthology Film Archives in New York (I knew I should have tried to work in that damn place).

This should lead us to conceptualize new ways of looking for these films. In truth, missing films could be anywhere and everywhere: Ray Carney did find John Cassavetes’ long lost extended-version of Shadows in, of all places, a box somebody forgot at a New York subway and stashed at the New York Metro’s lost-and-found office. And if there’s any chance of ever finding all three hours of Orson Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons, it would be in some dilapidated old hut in the middle of the Amazon. But in truth, the sources for Filipino movies are probably more straightforward.

Note however, that Avellana may have longer versions of this or Silos has a shorter version of that, but Filipinos really do not have the time or the energy to be preoccupied with looking for director’s versions of their films. Simply, if we use Magnificent Ambersons as a metaphor, were’ still too busy looking for the 88-minute version to be concerned with the three-hour masterpiece. We aren’t concerned with establishing the defining aspects of our auteurs (as the West is), but in having the evidence for their existence in the first place.

First, many Filipino films were shown all over the world in major film festivals. Venice has been thrown about more than a few times, as well as film festivals throughout Asia. Could films have been stashed in those cities as well? Sure, major metropolitan cities such as New York and Paris which also contain very active movie-going audiences may—and do—have Filipino movies, but smaller cities in Europe (such as Nantes), India, China, Japan, even Singapore which may have had film festivals in the past may also have archives of film stocks, dilapidated those archives may be. Tracing the origins of these films, and the way the films changed hands until they landed on the organizers of these smaller film festivals, may be as fruitful as, if not more so than, following the same trail for larger film festivals.

Second, as the Malaysian example show, Filipino films and filmmakers were largely bandied about in Asia during the country’s first cinematic Golden Age, and major studios abroad such as the Shaw Brothers were very influential in buying, dubbing, and distributing Filipino movies abroad. Although there is great preoccupation in trying to force major studios in the Philippines to open their vaults, why not divert some of the attention to foreign studios? One could assume that foreign studios may be no different, but as film preservation in Hong Kong, India, China, and Malaysia show, this may not be the case. (Of course, one could argue that the Indians are probably worse at saving their movies than we are: apparently the government’s archives only contain 4,000 films, out of the 900 or so made every year in Mumbai alone for the past 70 or 80 years. But unlike in the Philippines, the family dynasties that rule over the film industry are more than willing to preserve movies connected to their name, especially the Dutts and the Kapoors.)

Third, with the political content of our films, is it possible that they might have been sent to Latin America, especially with the rise of the influence of ICAIC in the region during the 70s? If the newly aroused political consciousness of European critics led to the “discovery” of the likes of Pasolini, Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Lino Brocka and their films, couldn’t some of the filmmakers and critics who attended the European film festivals that showcased the movies by these auteurs brought back copies to their respective countries? Latin America was (and is) a hotbed of international leftist and Third World defiance as represented in film. Especially for the Cubans, film took centrality in the new political revolutions taking place all over the continent. Have anybody checked the ICAIC archives? The Mexican archives? And to that extent, have anybody checked the former Soviet archives? If Soy Cuba (1964) was unearthed from the depths of Russian archives despite being long buried in memory, can we possibly do the same for such films as Moises Padilla Story (1961) or even Daigdig ng Mga Api (1965)?

The other extreme of Philippine cinema could be of help as well. On the one hand there’s the political consciousness of the films of the 60s through the 80s. On the other there’s the exploitation films not only of the 70s and the 80s where Cleopatra Wong and Weng Weng reigned, or the 60s where Gerardo de Leon and Eddie Romero slummed it with Roger Corman’s exploitation film outfits, but also the “Golden Age of Exploitation,” the 30s and the 40s when films from other countries, especially the “Orient,” were brought to American shores, cut, re-cut, scenes added, even multiple movies merged, and shown in seedy theatres as shocking views of an alien world.

One particular character is Lloyd Friedgen. As an enterprising producer, he traveled to Asia’s more active filmmaking industries—that is, the studios of the Philippines and India—to take films that could possibly attract an audience in the US. Two films he “discovered” that are now known amongst cult film enthusiasts are Forbidden Women (1948) by Eduardo Castro, the mind behind Zamboanga (1937; the print was discovered of all places in Finland) and Outrages of the Orient (1948) by Carlos Vander Tolosa, the man who made Bilanggong Birhen (1960) and Giliw Ko (1939). Of course, these movies were manhandled by Friedgen, cutting dialogue and action continuity and flow, reinserting scenes from other movies or scenes newly filmed by Friedgen to “spice-up” the story. If anything, if not re-done and re-transformed to at least remove scenes that are known to be Friedgen’s and not Castro’s/Tolosa’s, these movies are great windows to what would otherwise remain lost, hidden, and forgotten. Tracking Friedgen’s history, his dealings with other producers like him (especially another producer, Ray Friedgen, although I’m thinking they are the same person or possibly he is Lloyd’s father), and possibly any existing archive of his movies could uncover an interesting goldmine of unseen—but unfortunately molested—Filipino films.

Finally, for a people so defined by emigration as the Filipinos (it is important to note that OCWs, or Overseas Contract Workers, drive the country’s economy, Filipinos are fast becoming the largest Asian group in the US, and the Filipino immigration to Australia is one of the country’s largest), it could be possible that films followed Filipinos wherever there was a large concentration of them. Bollywood for example spread throughout much of Africa and Asia not simply because their simplicity and mindlessness (two elements which are not present in many a good Bollywood film) appealed universally, but because Indians brought their films with them to wherever they went. It’s no surprise that Bollywood is perpetually popular in African countries when one also points out that South Asians—called simply Asians in some countries—migrated in large numbers to the continent, especially during the era of European domination during the 19th and early 20th centuries, and established communities that retained contact with the motherland until today.

For Filipinos, for film, one area that might be worth studying is Hawaii (since I know more about Filipino immigration to the US than anywhere else, I’m going to talk about that). Unlike early Chinese migration to the mainland, early Filipino communities in continental US, especially in the West, were defined by their impermanence. Like the displaced Midwestern poor and the Mexican workers of the teens and 20s, Filipinos were by and large migrant workers, and they moved along with the crops and the available farm jobs. Wherever Filipinos rested, there was a community. This is far from being an ideal situation for establishing a cinema. (More permanent Filipino communities in places such as Stockton near san Francisco, and Southern California did not come about until the late 50s. And even then, it was still under the control of the constantly changing California cityscape. Philippinetown in Downtown Los Angeles for example is not really the historic home of the Filipino community in Los Angeles. The original Philippinetown was first located around Bunker Hill, which was displaced by the development of the Financial District, then later around Union Station, which was later displaced by the construction of the station. In San Francisco, the tenuous nature of the Filipino community is of course most prominently symbolized by the I-Hotel, a building that housed a significant Filipino community until the city government decided to demolish it to make way for urban development.)

Hawaii, on the other hand, had a much more stationary Filipino community. When immigration began in the 20s, Filipinos moved to Hawaii not only to work then move back to the Philippines (like the migrant workers in California then and the OCWs now), but rather to really establish a life in Hawaii. Although the bulk of the Filipino immigration to the US later drifted further east to the US mainland, and the Filipino immigration to Hawaii was not as significant as the second wave of immigration to places such as California and Virginia that took place in the 80s (only a few thousands, compared to hundreds of thousands), their rootedness and permanence nevertheless gives rise to speculation that cinemas catering to a Tagalog-speaking clientele may have existed in Hawaii. Although these films may have been destroyed and disposed as easily as they were back in Manila, it might still be worth seeking Hawaii’s archives to see if Filipino entrepreneurs did indeed bring their films to people who craved a taste of home, and if they did if those films survived at all.

Although the conditions of early migration to California discounts the possibility of films from the era to exist here (outside of private collections, that is), the conditions of the great wave of migration of the 80s did however made possible the spread of film in another format: through video. Whereas film depended on expensive and immobile equipment, video encased the film in a portable plastic box that could be played using another, but only slightly larger, box. Video diminished the quality of the image it displays, but it nevertheless allowed that image to be easily transferred out of the country, viewed thousands of miles away, and keep in a small compartment all the subtle mannerisms and idioms that define the culture where it came from, the culture which the displaced immigrant understands. It allowed the immigrant to keep contact with the land she left, something that is very important for the uber-patriotic Filipino. This is probably why the establishment of a Filipino video store, alongside a glorified sari-sari stores (stores that sold pretty much everything under the sun) and a turo-turo (literally “point-point,” cheap Filipino food a la carte), is enough to announce the establishment of a Filipino community.

The Filipinos who became Americans in the 80s didn’t stay in the Filipino epicenters of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Hawaii. They moved to Virginia, Florida, Washington DC, New York, New Jersey, Las Vegas, Chicago, and even New Orleans, like their 18th century predecessors. And with them came the video collections culled from back home, by the then classic and contemporary masters: Avellana, de Leon, Romero, Bernal, and Brocka. Not only this, film companies from the Philippines followed them too and catered to the community. Regal and Video films transferred many films to video and sold them to individual collectors and video stores. The irony is that since the conditions in the states were more conducive to preservation than back home (where the constant humidity and heat hastened the deterioration of both electronic and film sources), many videos that are scarce in the Philippines outside of Video 48 in Manila are common in more established Filipino communities (Oro, Plata, Mata for example, a film that is scarce in the Philippines, is available in all four of the video stores I frequent in Southern California. But that’s a subject for another post).

The end result of having such an active video scene within the immigrant community is the availability of films that would otherwise be absent. As already mentioned, video stores stock some titles that are rare anywhere else. In other times, the end result could even be the discovery of a film that exists in no other form: Brocka’s Tubog sa Ginto, for example, could now only be viewed because a beta tape was discovered in New York. Of course, I’m sure, like any video, the image quality is far behind of the image that could have been viewed if the actual film stock existed. But as I’ve said before, you take what you can. It’s better to have it in deteriorated state than not have it at all. This beta tape at least proves to us that there is indeed a film called Tubog sa Ginto, and that indeed we can view it for ourselves.

Philippine Racehorse

The Philippines' entry to the Oscars this year is Donsol, a 2006 film by Adolfo Alix, Jr. about the popular diving site where whalesharks are frequently sighted. Unfortunately, no DVD or VCD of it could be seen anywhere. Maybe this Oscars business could spur a company or another to release it, along with other deserving indie films, in a respectable DVD package.

• Here is the Inquirer article about it.

• Here is the film's official site. Click "Enter Site"...it's a fucking Twilight Zone.

• Here is what Oggs' Movie Thoughts thought about the film. Essentially, it's a pretty picture. He compares it to Jeffrey Jeturian's Minsan Pa (2004) which, fortunately, is on video with subtitles to boot.
  

• Here's a trailer:

Inang Yaya (Pablo Biglangawa & Veronica Velasco, 2006)

A digital film about the ubiquitous Filipina domestic worker, Inang Yaya is a Filipino reworking of James L. Brooks’ brilliant 2004 melodrama Spanglish, where a recent Mexican immigrant brings her daughter along when she stays with a rich West LA family in Malibu for the summer. In Inang Yaya, Norma (Maricel Soriano), a domestic worker in Manila brings her daughter Ruby (Tala Santos) with her after her mother (Marita Zobel), who was caring for her daughter while she stays in the city to take care of a wealthy couple’s daughter, Louise (Erika Oreta), suddenly dies. Just like in Brooks’ film, drama ensues after class tension forces Norma and Ruby to compromise their relationship for the sake of the family they serve. Directors Biglangawa and Velasco do a great job of translating the story into a new context, despite compromising some of Brooks’ insights for the sake of dramatic tesion.

First, the DVD. I have to say, I feel bad dinging Unico Home Entertainment for their DVD releases for they might just be one of the leading companies when it comes to releasing Filipino movies, both contemporary and classic. They started the trend in transferring Filipino films into digital medium with their Cinefilipino line, and now they are pushing the limits by releasing great but largely unknown classics from Lino Brocka. But the problem is their transfers suck. As I’ve said before, they pretty much botched up the DVD for Ina Kapatid Anak (and I’m not talking about the lengthy, complicated, and expensive process of restoration, but rather the simple and relatively inexpensive act of properly masking the film that is going to be digitized). Manila By Night is a mess. The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros is riddled with combing (which can be fixed by merely removing some of the extra crap they have on the DVD so that there will be more space for the film itself). And judging from the stock they will use for the Insiang DVD (the one used for the New York Film Festival screening, which had the subtitles burned-in), they will probably apply some weird and previously non-existent masking to cover up the burned subtitles. I wish to be proved wrong, but I doubt that that will be the case.

For Inang Yaya, the image looks like it was an internet video stretched out to DVD-sized image. The degree of pixelation makes it look like it was from a bootleg DVD (no, I wasn’t watching bootleg video). The colors were right-on—really, how can you mess up the colors in a digital feature?—but the pixelation was a major enough problem that it distracted from the viewing experience. Some would say that I should just be thankful, but personally this degree of carelessness is a reflection of just how much movies really are undervalued in Filipino society. Looking to make a quick buck, Unico’s DVDs look like something they wiped their ass with. Knowing the demand, they want nothing more but to satisfy the demand without giving anybody quality products.

Translating Spanglish to Tagalog seems to be a surefire way into making a blockbuster. Unlike Americans who cannot relate to the Spanglish’s wealthy families because domestic workers and personal helps remain a privilege of the wealthy, Filipinos in general know the experience of either being served by domestic servants or serving as a domestic help. Filipinos either carry fond memories of their yayas—which, unlike in the West, does not merely translate to “maid,” but rather something more endearing, like a governess who acts as a second mother—or the children they literally raise because of the absence of working parents. I personally was attracted to both Spanglish and Inang Yaya because of my own fond memories of my yaya, whose personal life I was never privy to, and who became a part of the family about the life of whom no one knows. She died of cancer a few years back, but I was not able to be there because we moved to the US. In her absence she became an enigma, much as Norma’s life unfolds before Louise’s eyes as if this woman who is practically her mother is just now introducing herself to Louise.

Inang Yaya and Spanglish’s triumph is in articulating what I have always found odd in having a yaya: the class difference that drives such relationships to exist and the class envy that drives people to enter such relationships fully knowing that they will be in the lower, serving end. What is fully extrapolated in Spanglish but subtly hinted upon in Inang Yaya is the economic gap that keeps the master and the servant from ever fully understanding each other. Inang Yaya’s publicity touts it as a film that explores the nature of motherhood and the ability of a woman to be a mother to a child that is not her own. Thankfully, it never actually does this, instead focusing on the perpetual difference of the servant from the master. The film’s preoccupation with slightly opened doors and windows and frames within frames does not connote a space through which people could meet each other, but rather the frames and entities that separate and prevent. When Ruby slowly forms a friendship with Louise, fade-ins have her move from one door frame to another, until she is sitting next to Louise. But when this connection is made, it is shot so as to revela Norma afar, ironing clothes, framed and separated by multiple door frames. Seeing her separation, we are reminded that Ruby is lured not simply by Louise, but by her toys. It is a companionship formed through class envy. But the most poignant use of these frames within frames is when Norma is helping Ruby and Louise get ready for school. Teased by her classmates for being poor, Ruby runs to the school bus so the other girls in the bus do not see her mother. When she sees that the girls forgot their lunch boxes, Norma runs to the bus to give them their lunch. She barely makes it, and when the door to the bus is closed, Nora’s face is framed by the door window, while in the foreground Ruby ducks her head in shame as the other girls laugh at her. The window emphasizes Norma slowly drifting away from her daughter, and Ruby’s slow destruction due to her difference.

Many viewers complain that the film lacks any sort of dramatic tension, but I think the tension comes in the details, specifically the clothes and the toys that define Louise and Ruby’s relationship. One of Louise’s first interaction with Ruby is when she recognizes Ruby’s shirt as one of her throw-aways that Norma took for her daughter. While Ruby looks on as an observer (behind doors, windows, and thin walls), Norma repeatedly keeps telling Louise to clean up her toys. In one scene, Louise hits Norma with her stuffed toy after Norma scolds her for being messy. As Ruby looks on, Norma looks ashamed, but continues her work simply because she has to. When Ruby asks for something—stationery stickers—what is revealed isn’t merely Ruby’s growing materialistic desire but Norma’s inability to provide for it. When her mistress May (Sunshine Cruz) asks her what’s wrong as she was about to tell Norma to change the sheets in the guest room, the connection is made between May and husband Noel’s (Zoren Legaspi) kindness and Norma’s role as a servant. When May buys Ruby the stickers she wanted, the couple’s “kindness” is laid bare: it isn’t merely kindness, but rather a payment for Norma giving up her role as a mother to her daughter.

It is however in the portrayal of Louise’s family that Inang Yaya failed, and miserably. Whereas it cleanly lifted the class tension and human dynamic in the domestic worker’s perspective from Spanglish, it failed to take that film’s humanist look at the lives of the wealthy. Whereas Brooks’ film delved deep into the damages privilege does to a family’s psyche, May, Noel, Lola/Grandma Toots (Liza Lorena) and Louise are mere witnesses—wooden witnesses, at that—to the drama that is Norma’s life. In its approach to the family’s desire to move to Singapore, we never understand it as anything more than a change in lifestyle, as if the family is just moving down the street. When the family pressures Norma to leave her daughter to move to Singapore with them, we are supposed to understand why exactly the family would do this. But the whole time, my reaction is, “who cares?” The film doesn’t establish this family’s concerns as weighing more than taking care of one’s own child. One could mention Louise’s attachment to Norma, but as the film’s preoccupation with the half-closed windows and doors show, her attachment is at best tenuous, one that remains between a servant and the master-child.

This oversight is also what causes the film’s most dramatic scene to fall flat. When Norma buys Ruby new shoes that look like Louise’s expensive shows only to find that the shoes are “Skeetchers,” not “Sketchers,” Ruby rejects the shoes, and ultimately her mother. The scene is witnessed by Louise, whose presence weighs heavily on the scene even if the camera relegates her to one small corner of the frame. The scene could have been as powerful as Flor (Paz Vega) quitting her job in Spanglish, and Cristina (Shelbie Bruce) voicing out her hatred and rejection of her mother for turning her back to luxury and comfort. In that scene, the resignation is witnessed by the members of the family, whose awakening is charted by the film. But in Inang Yaya, the witness isn’t awakened. Her complications as a character only extend as far as having an emotional attachment to her servant, but never her relationship to a servant. She isn’t awakened as much as she witnesses yet another teary scene between the mother and the daughter. Which is why her effort to reconcile the mother and the daughter (which Lola Toots crassly made explicit later on in the film) seems a little odd. It’s not for the sake of acceptance of self along with the acceptance of the mother, but merely for dramatic reconciliation.

This about face the film took—from a film that chronicles economic difference to one that just wants a smoothly dramatic tying of all elements—is redeemed by the ending that rejected the motherhood theme that its publicity touted over a critical look at salaried-motherhood. When Norma plays with the girls in what seems to be a dream-like, paradise-like setting, she asks if she could ever divide her heart over her daughter by blood and adopted daughter. Ironically, she wears a servant’s uniform. When the maid and her child-master are separated, Louise and her family leaves on a van, while Norma and Ruby leaves through a lowly tricycle. Louise may see her as a mother, but even in their separation are portrayed to be not in equal footing. These elements underline the film’s main tension, even if it still leaves the wealthy family inexplicably wooden.

Digital Goldmine

Bored and sleepless, I did what any self-respecting person does during times like these: go online and watch random videos from YouTube. Here I present you a slew of Ludacris videos I thought were pretty well made.


"Roll Out" (Jeremy Rall, 2001)

With an oversized head matching his oversize ego, oversized rims, and oversized pockets, Ludacris parodies his personality and the media and watchers that admire and loathe the image he peddles. He switches back and forth between pushing back busy bodies while parading the things these curious onlookers are asking about. It's a complicated relationship, underlined by the emphasis on the CGI fakeness of Ludacris' blown-up head. What is lost in the transaction Ludacris points out, as he flashes words on screen reenacting the rhymes coming out of him. It's genius: while tabloid headlines are boringly static, his lyrics jump across the screen, runs around, goes around him, etc. He also makes a counterpoint between the imagery of the words and the images of the words, as the poetic nature of the words battle the baseness of the lifestyle they portray.



"Money Maker" (Melina, 2006)

Although it looks very identical, this video has nothing on Kanye West's "Gold Digger", with its use of pin ups in lieu of stereotypical hip hop images of pretty women and a Kanye West with his back turned towards the camera to emphasize both the women (we only see the back of his head) and the "personal advice" like tone of the song. But its use of lighting, rich colors, and rhythmic editing is I believe equally competent. The relationship may even be intentional: with alternating flashes of booty and money, one can't help but be reminded of West's ode to women and the costly measures he is willing to take to keep them. West's admiration of the Gold Digger and Ludacris' of the said female's Money Maker (admitting both the exploitation of her ass and the ability of that ass to exploit back) presents a less vapid relationship between colored man and colored woman. It's not just between a bitch and a dog, but between two people using each other, both to pay for bills and to please themselves. In addition, the (pseudo) retro touches of frame growing within frames historicizes the sexual struggle as well as West's (inappropriate, to some extent) incorporation of Ray Charles' "I Got a Woman".


"Act a Fool" (Bryan Barber, 2003)

With candy colors whizzing by, Ludacris gives praise to the pop phenomena that are the racing culture and the gaming culture. Coupled with lyrics about materialist rebellion, the anatomy of a racing car, and the pleasures of sitting back and smoking up with your buddies, this video tries to capture and explain the spirit of underground and separatist cultures. The video starts with a motley crew of carts on wheels, be they brightly colored or dilapidated ice cream trucks, giving rise to nostalgic memories of those Twisted Metal games (yes, in existence mere ten years ago, yet that is the nature of the contemporary media landscape). As they race through the streets of Los Angeles (the city never looked so ugly yet so exciting), Ludacris touches upon every ridiculous details put on a lowly racing car: tv sets on the steering wheel, grills, NOS tanks, gigantic speakers...it's funny, yet affirms deep-seated capitalist fantasies. He gives a shout out to these cultures and pays his respect to the extent they have changed culture at large, especially hip hop and the influence hip hop has to American/Western culture.

Nights of Serafina (Joey Gosiengfiao, 1996)

Out of the five Joey Gosiengfiao films I have seen—Secrets of Pura (1989), Iskandalo! (1980), Exploitation, Nights of Serafina (1996), and Babae…Ngayon at Kailanman (1978)—Nights of Serafina is probably the closest to camp-filmmaker as Gosiengfiao got. (I have not seen Temptation Island (1981), so do not fault me for not considering that title.) Not just campy as in Secrets of Pura was, but made with camp aesthetic, with its preoccupation with the decorative and the aesthetic, and the documentation of cultural references through which these decorative elements are given importance. Instead of a focus on the story, Gosiengfiao’s preoccupation is the performance of the narrative and the narrative’s intents, the display of bodies and things rather than the exploration of the world in which bodies and things exist. It’s an ingenious rearranging, since it filters Gosiengfiao’s focus on Filipino provincialism and machismo, bypassing “storytelling” for the sake of getting to the narrative's core.

Nights of Serafina concerns Anton, a wealthy logger and his wife Serafina, a woman from the slums of Manila. They move to Anton’s house in a tropical island where they live with Anton’s domineering and disapproving mother (a staple in Filipino movies), his rebellious brother, his brother’s horny girlfriend (who lives with them so the family can curry favors from her powerful father), a mess of maids and servants, and a group of unhappy loggers working for the family. The workers’ unhappiness, the girlfriend’s dissatisfaction, and a servant girl’s longing for a more fast-paced life are shown parallel to Serafina's, whose unhappiness with Anton is exacerbated when she finds that he is impotent due to a childhood accident where a cut tree fell on his pelvic area. She finds happiness through a strike breaker, who she fell in love with after he forcibly made love with her during a ferry crossing. After the whole clan finds out, things come to a head when Serafina and her new lover try to hide the affair from Anton’s family and the town they control.

The film does have its faults, some major enough to ruin the narrative thrust. First, the soundtrack is too overbearing. The film uses two different tracks to illustrate all of the scenes in the film: a calypso track and an electronic track that sounds too much like porn music. Both do not really work because both promise mere titillation, which the film doesn’t really give. The calypso track I presume was used because Gosiengfiao used a lot of panoramic shot of the tropical island and shots of its aquamarine beaches. But far from merely depicting the beauty of the island, Gosiengfiao meant these shots to be more sinister. I wish I can say that the music emphasized the irony, but it was overused to the point of annoyance. The porn music was there essentially because by and large this movie is a skin flick, but the music made the film merely that, instead of a film that explored the very nature of sex.

Also, this might seem tedious and asinine, but there’s something wrong about the hair. First, continuity-wise, the men’s hairdos change from short to long unexpectedly from scene to scene. It was distracting and made their hair less of a component in a film where hair seems to be such a big symbol. Whereas Serafina’s hair is composed to be wild and seductive (there’s a direct reference to Rita Hayworth, with the way she flings it about), the mother’s was tightly wrapped in an updo and the girlfriend’s hair is free and let down but looks more contrived than Serafina’s. The way the women’s hair fell on their heads and the way their hair looked on close-ups was as important to Gosiengfiao’s framing as the face itself, and it’s a shame that for the men the same was not the case.

The constant image is that of the phallic being torn down, cut off, or useless. Anton's failing logging business lies parallel to his equally failing penis. His brother on the other hand could perform just fine, but his prowess is taxed by his efforts to adhere to tradition, constantly trying to force his promiscuous girlfriend to settle down and start a family. Apparently, the trait runs in the family: the father’s inability to perform also caused his wife to be unfaithful, thus driving the father to commit suicide. One could say that this problematic situation is formulaic and typical of femmes fatales: a woman who, unhappy with what she has, chooses to betray the people around her and cause their demise. But Gosiengfiao portrays it differently: the women are not merely dissatisfied, they are downright deprived. Serafina has nothing to be dissatisfied of. The women, who constantly strike glamour poses (as fetishistic phallic substitutes)—Serafina is introduced as a model standing atop a column—as men around them stare in awe, are collected as if to compensate for what the men lack.

Although Gosiengfiao makes use of the forests and the beaches that dot the island in which the film is based, his intent is neither to make the story more beautiful nor to make sex/love more natural. Whereas a hack filmmaker would have portrayed the jungle as a place where man and woman could be liberated from inhibitions and culture and just do whatever they damn well please, Gosiengfiao takes it a step back and portrayed the jungle and beach scenes as places where culture and morals are more at play than anywhere else. In the jungle—at a place called Forbidden Place—the sex isn’t al fresco, but takes place at a centrally located hut that makes all the sexual conflicts that happen there look like plays on domestic life. Even the very idea of “a place where forbidden things happen” suggests the very mores and laws that make certain things forbidden and not the unspecified “forbidden thing” itself. Even if this is not the case, the attention given to the prying eyes hidden amongst the foliage that watch the forbidden things as they happen—and at the beach, hidden by sunglasses and rocks—underlines less the forbidden act (which, in being performed, liberates) than the act of watching, of safely participating in things forbidden through the protection of the fourth wall.

Opposed to the jungle, the man-as-animal exists in the house and within social functions when man interacts with fellow humans. In a brilliant sequence, when Serafina arrives at Anton’s house, Anton’s mother plans a wedding party for them by bringing in a slew of animals to be killed and eaten. When Anton’s mother finally sees Serafina and rejects her, her rejection is juxtaposed with cuts of animals being slaughtered. The juxtaposition is bridged by Anton’s mother smoothly transitioning between managing the slaughter and managing her rejection of Serafina. Using close ups of the mother and the slaughter, Gosiengfiao emphasizes the barbarism and inhumanity of the mother’s actions. In another sequence, after Anton discovers Serafina’s infidelity and orders his workers to kill her lover and rape her, her rapists are shown hovering over her not as men but as hyenas ready to kill and eat a prey they have pinned. It would have been less effective if it just invoked the image of hyenas eating. Instead, the men literally looked like a gang of cannibals about to mercilessly tear into a prey.

This sounds all too academic, but Nights of Serafina is anything but. The sex isn’t merely metaphorical; it is as erotic as anything that could be shown in theatres. The centrality of the “glamour pose” is made erotic by focusing on the sleekness of the female body as seen from a lower angle, as if looking up at a towering statue. However, it is also made to be funny due to its mere existence. The women kind of just strike poses randomly, as if to constantly remind the men of what the ydo not have. Being a gay filmmaker, Gosiengfiao catches the male body at times when it is half clothed: after taking a shower or right after sex (the woman isn’t treated to the same disrobing. The women are always covered up after sex, and when their clothes are being torn off, strategically placed objects always cover the naughty bits at the expense of revealing their partner’s private areas.) When they cannot be placed in the same context, Gosienfiao makes sure that they are. During a fight scene, after Anton slaps the hell out of his brother’s girlfriend, he proceeds to wrestle with his brother wearing only speedos. It’s Gosiengfiao’s personal paradise, and a commentary on traditional Filipino machismo: man disrobed and fetishized, man deprived of his phallo-ceintric power. But the way he makes his point is so cheeky despite being so destabilizing that one cannot help but take Gosiengfiao's challenge to the very foundation of Filipino society in stride.

Kubrador (Jeffrey Jeturian, 2006)

Jueteng, as Kubrador reminds us, is a numbers game that is as common and popular in the Philippines as lotto is to the Americans. Everybody plays it and a kubrador (bet collector) talking up potential customers is a common sight in villages and neighborhoods across the country. Its ubiquity would have been reason for avoiding it as a movie’s focal point, if not for the fact that it is also illegal in the country and the irony that results creates much tragedy or an illustration thereof. But unlike things illegal in the West, jueteng isn’t sexy. There’s no edgy appeal to playing jueteng. It’s associated less with celebrities than it is with bored grandmothers and corrupt politicians. This lack of mystique allows Jeturian to bare the game naked and use it as an allegory to the contemporary Filipino condition. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but by and large it does well in injecting new blood into the art of Tagalog filmmaking.

Gina Pareño is Amy, a cautious yet bet collector whose desperation drives her to push her luck despite the chances of getting caught by the police. Everyone knows her—everyone calls out her name as she passes by, gives her the latest gossip, and of course, gives her their numbers (and money). As an agent of the popular jueteng, her character traverses the different levels of the hierarchy of Filipino society, from the slums to the local jueteng bosses to the regional cashier, and to the police, who gives her their bets right in their station. She gets very little for her work, and she suffers through long days and stubborn customers unwilling to part with their money. But she still does it, from desperation or some illogical sense of adventure we are never really sure (she’s poor, yes, that in itself never seem to be the only reason for being a bet collector; simply manning their house-front store and devoting her life only on that seems like a boring life relegated to daytime TV and disintegration).

The film is most effective when it “merely” observes. As a digital production, the resulting image could not help but have a very deep depth of focus. However, this is not to the movie’s detriment, as it lends a depth of meaning in allowing the eyes to wander through the milieu that Jeturian records. By avoiding close-ups and blurred backgrounds—and thus shot counter shots and heavy action-reaction editing—Kubrador successfully becomes never a “mere story,” but rather a depiction of a condition and a reality. In addition, the movie’s numerous long takes, especially the opening scene (which felt like a journey to the depths of hell guided by our Virgil-kubrador, appropriately followed by a chase scene filmed atop the tin roofs of the shantytown as if Dante just dug himself out of Hell only to be kicked back into it) and the last scene, adds to the sense of reality merely recorded, and thus the expectant complications that comes therewith. Instead of an “issue”—as it has been treated in popular Filipino media especially during the last seven or eight years—jueteng becomes a tool in sketching experiences and realities, and the intersecting motives and rationales that drive these experiences and realities to come about.

The movie however fails when Jeturian moves away from neorealism to moralism. Amy works because she has a lazy husband. Jeturian never expands the husband’s character to allow us an insight in why he does not work. Simply, he is a Juan Tamad (Lazy John) archetype, and the invocation of that is enough for his marginalization. Worse off, he watches Filipino television. Never mind that he must have reasons for watching this mindless piece of diversion. But all we see is of him in extreme close-up, obviously enjoying the stupid game shows and gyrating half-clad women on “Wowowee” (a local noon-time game show, which recently got involved in a cheating “scandal”). Only that for Jeturian, he abhorrently does. Also, in two potentially effective scenes, Kubrador merely becomes polemic. In one, Amy, busy writing numbers down, wanders off into unknown alleys and becomes lost. Instead of increasing Amy’s—and our—confusion, we are instead reminded of the hopelessness of the slums: “confusion” in air quotes. In another, when Amy goes to a gambling cashier’s house to collect winnings, the cashier (played by Johnny Manahan) goes off into a rant about buwayas (literally alligators, corrupt politicians) and the church, and how they hypocritically benefit from jueteng while they condemn it. The cashier’s speech could have been easily inserted into the narrative, but is instead turned into a lecture on the inner workings of illegal gambling and political corruption. True as these concerns may be, the movie becomes issue-oriented, thus losing the complexity of reality.

I think this same issue is what ultimately made Jeturian’s Tuhog (2001) equally unsatisfying despite being compelling. In Tuhog, where two filmmakers adapt a rape victim’s story only to turn it into a skin flick, Jeturian explores the “divide” between fiction and reality and how maintaining and transgressing this divide fuel Filipino cinephilia. The movie could have been effective, if only Jeturian could have kept himself from being too excited. Once he gets worked up, he acts just like anyone who gets a pulpit. In Tuhog, even though he balances “reality” and the two filmmakers’ rendition of this “reality” quite well, he slips into a condemnation of “fiction,” over-dramatizing the filmmakers’ version of reality to over-emphasize its falsity. The movie thus went from an exploration of the Filipino film industry to a didactic piece about the evils of it.

Despite all these, Tuhog and Kubrador are not bad movies. They are very thoughtful films, and made with an original and irrepressible vision of truth and reality. But if Jeturian doesn't watch it, he might just become the new Gil M. Portes, another Filipino movie maker who makes great films hampered by an inability to resist grandstanding. (His Homecoming (2003), for example, was a great film crippled in the last minute by Portes’ main character’s need to “educate” her fellow Filipinos.) However, unlike Portes, Jeturian at least shows an ability to grow, to develop a trust in his audience’s ability to perceive the reality he submits. In a recent “Maalaala mo kaya?” (Would you remember?) Jeturian-directed episode (which aired on TFC here in Los Angeles on 01 SEP 2007), issues of poverty, family, and international identity are treated to a rendition that both kept the gravity of these issues intact, while at the same time keeping the rendition squarely populist (but not condescending either, using melodrama but not histrionics). This goes to show that Jeturian has the makings of a Vidor or de Sica if only he realizes the inherent intelligence of his “masa.”

Fuck Cinema: the poseur and the artist

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.